Vagrancy

I accidentally came across Swedish scholar Carl G.
Liungman’s Dictionary of Symbols(1994) in
which he compared the Swedish, the English and the American visual codes used by hobos, vagabonds, and gypsies to transmit vital information to their pairs. These migrant and most often
non-literate populations used these pictograms drawn or carved on walls, fences or other surfaces, in the period leading up to World War II.

Liungman’s work lead me to the iconic industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss who chronicled the
art of hobo signs in his 1972 Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols, three decades after the Great Depression.
Dreyfuss had tracked down the backstories of 60 signs.

Liungman contributed forty additional symbols, includedthe English and the Swedish pictogrammes,and then went on tocompare their similarities and
differences.

Not being a design student myself I did not know about Dreyfuss’s Sourcebook and I
became totally fascinated by it. It also reminded me of something else. Going back to my readings onJean-Michel
Basquiat I learned thatDreyfuss’sbook had been an inspiration to him, and that he had used its symbols in a few of his paintings. And that is where I had first seen them, but in a completely different
context.

I began to draw each sign and write it’s meaning on small watercolour paper. I then
decided they should have a color code representing their meaning, and I adopted the pre-determined colors of thesignalling systems. So Danger would be red, Caution would be yellow and Safety would be green, with a few blue exceptions when water or faith were involved. I soon had 125 watercolours, most of them showing one sign, and others
comparing two or three signs. Put together, they tell about the worries and concerns of homeless people and their daily quest to find food, security and a safe bed to sleep. And despite their
perilous situation, the signs illustrate their willingness to share this vital information with others like them.